From ‘Shared Wisdom in an Age of Change’ to ‘Code Red for Earth’
The forward-looking steps that Bruno Marques has been taking with the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) won’t be stopping any time soon.
Indeed, having now formally moved into a consecutive second term as IFLA President means that by the end of his Presidency the Wellington-based academic will have served in the leading role from 2022 to 2026.
Bruno talked recently with Landscape Architecture Aotearoa about the journey he’s been on.
We started by looking back from the 60th IFLA Congress held in Türkiye last month to the IFLA 50 Congress held in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 2013.
“I was an early participant in IFLA congresses, dating back to 2006, and I’ll always remember IFLA50 because it was, as a European, my first introduction to Aotearoa New Zealand”.
Prior to that IFLA 50 Congress – which had the theme of ‘Shared Wisdom in an Age of Change’ – Bruno had been working with Di Menzies (another IFLA President from New Zealand from 2006-2010) on a corporate governance review for IFLA.
He subsequently served on the IFLA executive, then headed by Professor Kathryn Moore of the UK, up until 2018/19 when he took a break.
Bruno Marques back on the Te Aro campus of Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka with landscape architecture colleague Vikki Chanse.
Talking with Bruno at the Te Aro campus of Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka, where he works as Associate Dean for Academic Development and Senior Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, it’s hard to imagine him doing anything near to ‘taking a break’.
Sure enough, he was convinced to put himself forward for the IFLA Presidency at the 2022 Congress held in South Korea, and has been on a “rollercoaster” ever since.
Bruno has held true to the platform of focussing on the profession’s visibility, driven along by the glaring need he discerned for growing connections across international frameworks.
“My focus was primarily on the vast network of United Nations organisations, where apart from UNESCO, the landscape architecture profession’s visibility and access to higher level realms of policy was all but zero”.
The ‘soft targets’ Bruno set for turning that lack of visibility around, has extended to two UN agencies in his first term as IFLA President: UN-Habitat and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
“We now have a memorandum of understanding with UN-Habitat, an organisation that through events such as the World Urban Forum has an extensive reach into relevant projects around the world. There are clear areas of expertise that landscape architects can contribute to and offer a regional capacity for.
“UNEP operates across a wider spectrum again, and our invitation for a UNEP delegation to take part in the 60th IFLA Congress was a milestone ‘first’. It represents another step forward in creating important relationships and the prospect of another MOU”.
But wait, there’s more. Bruno is also setting his sights on the Healthy Cities work done by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the work of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
If this was a set of ‘collaborative cards’ you could say Bruno is after the full set.
He also recognises the prerogative of building on all of the existing relationship potential that resides in peak bodies for like-minded professional entities and adjacent networks – citing the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, World Green Infrastructure Network and International Society for Urban Health as examples.
Bruno is also committed to opening up new channels and prising apart hard-to-open doors with the likes of the International Union of Architects (UIA).
“I’m not oblivious to the dysfunctional aspects of the UN, and the melting pot of other frameworks.
“To me this is all about plugging IFLA into those frameworks, putting pieces together, educating people about the things we do as a profession and ensuring that landscape architects are a part of the discussion”.
On top of all this the whole world of COPs is, as Bruno says, “a different ball game”.
IFLA’s hard work has seen it accredited for having a presence up to and including the ‘blue zone’ of Government headed COPs.
COPs (the acronym stands for Conference of the Parties) are the rolling processes that include the upcoming UN Convention on Biological Diversity COP 16, the UN Climate Change COP 29 and COP 16 of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification– sequentially hitting the ground in October, November and December. (Bruno will be at the Biological Diversity COP in Colombia).
IFLA President Bruno Marques speaking at IFLA’s 60th World Congress - 'Code Red for Earth’ - in Istanbul.
But wait - you guessed it - there’s more.
Adherence to IFLA’s key pillars, and an emphasis on growing a “safe place” for incorporating the worldviews of indigenous and First Nation peoples, is paramount for Bruno.
In a form of full circle, Bruno is using his second term to steer IFLA towards revisiting its corporate governance workings, and an extra Council meeting per year has been instituted to assist with its agenda.
He is keen to transparently “reimagine” what it would take to have a more agile structure that can maximise internal points of growth – regionally as well as internationally.
It's a marvel that Bruno finds the time for all this as well as his university responsibilities and his extensive mahi of publication, research and engagement.
When he’s not on a high rotation of taxiing his way from airports to hotels, Bruno’s days back in Aotearoa are a case of squeezing ‘two days’ into one: campus-time during the day, and IFLA time during the night.
“The time differences work for me in that regard,” he says.
This ‘boy from Portugal’ is certainly giving everything he can to his chosen profession, using his faculty of mind to absorb all the big questions.
Bruno will mark two more turns at the President’s podium at IFLA Congresses, one in Nantes in France next year followed by Hong Kong in 2026.
The possibility of taking a break may then return, but with a ‘Red Code for Earth’ sounding out loud around the world, taking a break for very long might not be an option. We need you Bruno.